The Age of Us

The Age of Us…
WE are the next BIG thing.

First off, I feel compelled to say this is a post about the value of interpersonal communication and emotional inttellegence, not nationalist propaganda. The Us I refer to is YOU and I ( the royal we man) not the United States. While I love me some American, that is not the focus of this piece.

While I have always ben interested in information management technology, I have been downright fascinated with people.More than just a “people person” I’m a people enthusiasts.This interest served me well in my career in technical support and application development.The technical part was usually pretty black and white.What was much more nuanced was the communication required to make sure what was wanted and what was delivered bore a significant resemblance to one another.

Having failed at this as many times as I succeeded, my interest in the seemingly simple exercise of interpersonal communication grew.It seemed that more than just word choice, vocabulary and context, truly effective communication required successfully navigating the complicated and subjective realms of emotionality, psychology and yes even spirituality.

To help provide some empirical evidence to better understand my dilemma I started an experiment of sorts.I began asking people from many different professions and backgrounds a simple question. “What is the most difficult part of your job?”

Whether I was asking a nurse, a police officer, an entrepreneur or elected official, the response was invariably some form of “dealing with people”.I would then ask how much of their formal training and ongoing education was focused on and better prepared them for the most difficult part of their job.The answer to this was almost always ZERO.No wonder we are so bad at it.Our society largely regards any systematized effort to “better understand” one another as “warm, fuzzy mumbo jumbo”.

This discovery ignited a new found passion and course of study that continues to this day and can be best encapsulated in what I call the Age of Us. This dawning age is one where WE are the next big thing.While technological advancements still offer a great deal of promise, I believe that having a better understanding how WE work is what represents the greatest potential for progress.

So what does all this have to do with how I am now making a living?Well, while we will still have some technical offerings, our primary services will be centered around organizational and team development and facilitated discussions. I’ll explain more in subsequent posts, but suffice it to say, I’m thrilled about the new possibilities.